more strongly than ever the confinement
to a river, while the sea would have been so open and grand under such a
breeze. Therefore I gave up all idea of sailing down the Seine any more,
and decided to get towed to Havre, and to launch out fairly on our proper
element once more.

Yet it was fine fun to row about in the dingey, and to discover a quaint
old inn, and to haul ashore my tiny cockleshell and dine. Here they were
certainly an uncouth set, they did not even put a cloth on the table, nor
any substitute for it,--a state of things seen very seldom indeed in the
very outermost corners of my various trips.

Faithful promise was made by a man that he would rouse me from slumber in
my cabin under the haybank at the passing of the next steamer, be it
light or dark at the time. The shriek of the whistle came in the first
hours of morning, and the man ran to tell it, with one side of his face
shaven, and the other frothed over with lather.

Being towed down is so like being towed up the river, that we need merely
allude to a few features in the voyage westward.

At one pretty town we stopped to unload cargo for some hours, and I
climbed the hills, scaled the old castle walls, and dived into curious
tumbledown streets. The keeper of the newspaper-shop confessed to me his
own peculiar grievance, namely, that he often sent money to England in
reply to quack advertisements, but never had any reply. He seemed to be
too "_poli_" to credit my assertion that there are "many rogues in
perfidious Albion," and on the whole he was scarcely shaken in the
determination to persevere in filling their pockets, though he might
empty his own.

An old man at a lock was delighted by a New Testament given to him. "I
know what this is; it is Protestant prayers. Oh, they are good." Then
he brought his wife and his grandchildren, and every one of them shook
hands.

It was not very easy to get one's sea-stores replenished in the
continuous run down the Seine. Sometimes I saw a milkman trundling his
wheelbarrow over a bridge, and, jumping on shore, I waylaid him for the
precious luxury, or sent off a boy for bread, and butter, and eggs; but,
of course, the times of eating had nothing to do with any hours, or
recurring seasons for a meal: you must cook when you can, and snatch a
morsel here or there, in a lock or a long reach of the stream. At night
the full moon sailed on high, and the crew lay down with their faces over
the steame